January 2014

January 23, 2014

No one denies that Walter White, protagonist of the recently ended TV series Breaking Bad, is evil. He’s a drug dealer, he kills lots of people who get in his way, and he’s mean and manipulative toward the people unfortunate enough to be in his life. In the last weeks of the show, however, there was a media frenzy that appeared driven by the fear of not appearing to condemn him enough. An anti-ideal viewer was posited, apparently a composite of annoying online commenters and presumed weirdo stalkers, who thought Walt was a real hero, and coverage was strangely tilted toward the project of curing those people. (I won’t deny people like that exist. I’m sure media critics have met some of them. There are people who think the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto is a hero, too. I do doubt that enough people saw Walter White as a true hero that discussion of the show ought to have revolved around those who did. A few examples of the phenomenon might have merited a news story, maybe.)

Those people were assured that it was wrong to admire Walter White—presumably in any way at all. We were all assured that there was a moral point to the show, and that the point was that Walt was evil and always had been. It was black and white, and there was no room for grey. Say something about any of his actions other than it was morally bad, and you were missing the point. You were “watching wrong.”

But Walt was always largely an ordinary guy. The moral questions come in at the points where he makes bad choices. No one would have watched the show, and the character wouldn’t have worked, if he hadn’t been either sympathetic in many ways, or sufficiently typical that many people would recognize him as like someone they’d known, or both. If Walter White had been all evil, like a character in Grand Theft Auto, nearly none of those critics would have been writing about him. There had to be a contrast between good traits and bad ones, and this means there had to be good traits to begin with.

And the show wouldn’t have gotten so much word of mouth, or so much critical attention, if there weren’t something going on thematically, above and beyond the tried-and-true “criminal drug dealer.” To look at these, it’ll be necessary to see Walt as not 100% evil. The points that follow will look at him as a character in a kind of workplace drama.

1. There’s a sense in which Jesse is the narrator of the show, the point of view character through whose eyes we see Walter White, though this isn’t carried through consistently. Walter is, at the beginning, the Bad (Mean) Teacher, and at the end he’s the Bad (Mean) Boss. I don’t mean to say that Walt’s actions are evil only in Jesse’s opinion. But he’s a fantasy figure of an evil person. And to a pretty big extent he’s the kind of evil person who’d be imagined by someone who was his student or his employee. He berates Jesse for buying the wrong kind of bucket. He tells Jesse he’s stupid. He orders Jesse to carry out unethical acts. He makes it so that Jesse has to work hard every day in order to protect the woman he loves. He is responsible for Jane’s death (though, while that is in fact the case, Jesse was largely responsible for Jane’s taking up drugs again, because he wanted to be with her and he wanted to do drugs, and he made it clear to her that she couldn’t be with him unless she didn’t only tolerate his use but used with him). He got his DEA agent brother-in-law on Jesse’s back. Every bad thing that has happened to Jesse, and increasingly so as the series came to its end, was Walter White’s fault. If Walt’s the Devil, in some sense he’s Jesse’s personal devil, not a universal one.

But this fact is tied intricately to the fact that Walt is in many ways a typical science teacher and a typical technical middle-management boss. We don’t see as much of the direct harm caused by illegal drugs (when we do it’s a personal concern of Walt’s wife and child, and of individual police officers), possibly because that’s a harm Jesse doesn’t care much about. Rather, a lot of Walt’s behavior is familiar to us from teachers, scientists, and managers we’ve known, or even from ourselves if we are teachers, scientists, or managers.

2. At the beginning of the show, Walt really is a caricature of the college professor. He’s a pedant, disrespecting Jesse for not caring about his class and not understanding or remembering the material. He knows a hundred different types of glassware and insists each must be used in precisely the right way.

Jesse, like the viewer, overlooks this because Walt’s finickiness really does work, but it is very funny when it occurs in the first several episodes. It’s something a lot of people might do, but it gets laughs because it’s exaggerated and it goes on at such extreme length.

Walt is like the college professor who decides to go into business, to use his knowledge in the real world, and can’t accept that he still has anything to learn about the way theory maps onto the real world. He knows that meth production is a chemical process, and he believes that as a chemistry Ph.D. he knows everything about it. What he sees in the industry appalls him, because it doesn’t follow any of the rules he believes are necessary. He’s convinced that he’s smarter than the people actually in the business. He would have done it a different way than them, and he believes his way relies on science and theirs doesn’t. He believes that if they did things his way, everything would be better. Some writers have seen Walt’s racism in this attitude—the people actually in the business, for the most part, are Hispanic—but at the beginning it’s associated with Walt’s pride in being a real scientist. He’s furious that someone like Jesse, who slept through class and knows so much less than he does, can make a living off of his science.

In these ways, Walt is totally normal. These aren’t monstrous character traits. Many are quirks and at most are minor flaws. Walt is characterized largely through the kind of thing many viewers will recognize with some fondness or at least familiarity, and may identify with.

3. Walt is also like a scientist or engineer who wants to start his own business but doesn’t know anything about business. The first couple seasons get a lot of black-comic mileage out of Walt’s total ignorance of the business side. (Ignoring the fact that, by rights, he should have been dead the minute he invented a better method and allowed the current market leader to get wind of it.) He thinks sales and marketing are going to be a piece of cake, and that Jesse (who he thinks is a moron) can do them without help. When Jesse runs into problems, he assumes that the problems arise solely out of Jesse’s incompetence, and decides he can do the work himself without help.

Unlike with the conflict between academia and industry, where Walt’s ideas about applied science create a super-drug and have no ill effects (except oversupply of product and undersupply of qualified workers), Walt’s ideas about business don’t work out—at least for him, personally. The business grows, and his independent ventures are in some sense a success, but the result is always catastrophe, and he gets pulled in more and more to a world of immorality.

Walt thinks the “businesspeople” he encounters should listen to him because he’s smarter than they are, because he’s the one who knows the product and knows how to make it. He has no idea how to interact with a crime boss and thinks he can just make demands, and get himself listened to, because he knows he’s right. He can’t get out of a business relationship except by violence against the other partner, because he’s always the weak one in the relationship, regardless of the merits as a non-criminal might see them. He runs through distributor after distributor until he decides he’s learned enough to do it himself again. Then he micromanages Jesse and imposes unrealistic quotas on him. Finally, he teams up with Gus Fring, whom he apparently sees as a “white knight,” a real businessman and a gentleman, who promises to make the operation run smoothly. This is pretty typical (violence and so on excepted, and inability to end contracts except by way of the death of either party) for a technical guy trying to make it in the business world, who might seesaw between wanting to be the boss and recognizing that he has few management skills, between wanting everything focused on the technical end and recognizing that things run better (and are better capitalized) when finance- and sales-oriented people are in charge.

And at first, Walt loves working in Gus’s operation: someone else is taking care of all the details and he can spend all his time on the kind of work he loves. The problems arise when he runs afoul of Gus’s operation’s red tape (especially in the form of Mike, Gus’s enforcer). More specifically, problems arise when Walt decides to take on Jesse (because he’s come to see his Jesse as a kind of a son, and presumably because he feels guilty about what happened to Jane). That raises the question of what to do about Gayle, and eventually brings Walt into conflict with Gus over Jesse himself (see below). Eventually, Walt decides that he doesn’t like working for another man, after all, even a man like Gus Fring who seemed at first to be so much like him. He decides once again that he’s learned enough from Gus, the more experienced operator, to strike out on his own.

It’s not the worst thing in the world to be bad at business, especially when the business is drug dealing. It can be ridiculous, though, and become a matter for comedy. But these are real flaws, because Walt’s failure to recognize his limitations leads him both to make terrible business decisions and to refuse to quit. Breaking Bad portrays these flaws so well that, as a result, some viewers apparently cheer for his opponents in these transactions: despising him just as Mike does, for example, because he doesn’t understand Mike’s code and the way he believes business has to be done.

4. For Walt, the corporate world was represented by Gus Fring. Walt wanted to be a part of the corporate world, to belong to an organization that worked. He admired Gus and saw him as someone he could work with, someone whose values he shared. But when Gus pressured Walt to treat Jesse more harshly, Walt tried to avoid that pressure. This was the point at which a breach opened between him and Gus, setting him at odds with corporate discipline, and forcing him, eventually, out of the corporate world entirely. Some of the best scenes in the show involved Walt’s efforts to deal with Jesse in his own way, and his sense that Gus stood in the way of that. A scene might be staged so that Jesse faces both Walt and Gus, with Walt in the middle between the two other men: Walt wants Gus to recognize that Jesse will be dealt with only by him. But the arrangement doesn’t last for long.

Jesse is trained by Mike to find a place in the organization outside Walt’s control. Tragically, it was only when working for the evil but competent manager, Gus Fring, that Walt could behave with even minimal care for Jesse. And it was only by apprenticing himself to a cold-hearted muscle man who denies himself the right ever to take a decision on his own that Jesse freed himself from submission to Walter.

5. There are also some interesting things to look at, with regard to Skyler and her employment as a bookkeeper by Ted Beneke. It’s disappointing that while the writers come up with an intricate, original version of a boss/worker relationship for Walt and Jesse, when it comes to a female version of the scenario, they fall back on the clichéd story of the boss who wants to sleep with his subordinate. However, it is interesting the way Skyler sees herself as more competent than her boss—at either following the rules or covering up embezzlement successfully, whichever you prefer—in the same way that Walt sees himself as more competent than Jesse and his competitors. It’s just that the way the situation plays itself out isn’t as intriguing: it ends when she gives in to Ted’s sexual demands (to take revenge on Walt), deciding to stay on the job and help cover things up. That ends when she decides she isn’t really happy in the relationship. It plays a little more engagingly than I’ve made it sound, but in the end the only boss of an employed woman (portrayed in the show, that is, not counting Skyler’s sister, who’s a radiology technician, and not counting Hank’s and Saul’s secretaries) is trying to seduce her.

6. By the end of the show, it’s true, Walt’s dilemma was morphing, from something specific to his character as a scientist, to something more general. The show became more focused on the question whether Walt could respect himself when he wasn’t the one making the ultimate decisions, when he had to answer to a boss who told him what to do, when he wasn’t able to claim full responsibility for everything that happened around him. A lot has been written on this question already. But it isn’t a question that’s specific only to people who are like Walter White in one way or another, whether it’s his trust in science or his contempt for salespeople. And the desire to be “the one who knocks” rather than the one whose door is knocked on isn’t something anyone should organize their life around, but the dilemma that underlies it—the conflict between independence and lack of full control—is not pathological. This dilemma may have drawn a different kind of fan base for the show, but to reduce its issues to questions of a generic “manliness” erases the specifics that were gradually set up in the earlier seasons, and clouds a lot of the questions being raised.

January 15, 2014

Generally, I think I decided I don’t like books that tell me the way things are as much as books that explore the world from a point of view of not understanding everything yet. That’s maybe a little paradoxical, because I’m not opposed in principle to understanding and generalizations and things like that. It might be that I don’t like being imposed on by opinions I don’t agree with. It might even be a modernist dislike of fictional didacticism.

A quick rundown:

Literary fiction: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. The best novel I read all year, but I’m separating out literary fiction here for the reason that I’m defining it as books that won’t be liked by those who don’t like literary fiction (and you know who you are). I’ve been putting off writing about this in more detail, in part because I hate the idea of recommending a book to someone who I can already predict is going to hate it, but if you like this sort of thing, it’s a very, very good example of this sort of thing.

Genre fiction: Zero History, by William Gibson, with Ken MacLeod’s The Night Sessions as a reasonably close runner-up. Separating out genre fiction for the same reason (you know who you are—and these are both science fiction books).

“Mainstream” fiction: Not really a category, but a late surprise was Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which was a terrific novel to read when I was sick for a few days over Christmas and luckily had someone to take over for me so I could lie down and try not to think about food. Unfortunately, the middle third was a little expository (read: info-dump), but the first two hundred pages and the last two hundred pages were . . . page-turners. This is a novel about the daughter of a historian who has been researching legends about Dracula—who is real.

Non-fiction: The Age of Fracture, by Daniel Rodgers (via), an intellectual history of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, and The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor, billed as a self-help book but with lots of direct discussions of psychological research. Runner-up: Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts, which covered a lot of ground and I think didn’t tie all the strands together, but provides a lot of food for thought.

Most disappointing: The Road. I can see that this is pretty good, from an objective point of view, but I don’t think I “got” it. (This is a more admiring take, and I’m sure you can find more online.) And I don’t think what bothered me about it was the depiction of a science fiction like scenario combined with a refusal to do any world-building or scene-setting at all. The lack of context did bother me, but for me it goes deeper than just world-building. I expected a literary read to put up more challenges to my powering through it really quickly, for one thing, and those challenges weren’t there. That might just be a matter of my expectations, and my preconceptions about the book aren’t really about the book itself.

January 13, 2014

Twitter isn’t a messaging platform, like e-mail or SMS texting. It isn’t one-to-one: you send a message to another person, they reply. It isn’t even one-to-many: you send a message to every other member of a group. It’s a broadcast mechanism: one-to-all.

When you send a tweet, your message goes in a big box with all the other tweets.[1] To make Twitter usable, messages in that enormous box can be searched. You can go to a particular person’s feed, and see everything they’ve sent out. Or you can search the text of all the tweets in the box. You can do any kind of search, but two special kinds of search have become common: searching by username, where it’s referenced in the tweet, and searching by hashtag. There are no real guidelines for how to use these. People use them however they want, and a kind of norm gradually develops, but different groups will naturally develop different norms—based, among other things, on how their friends use the service and on the kinds of platforms they’ve used in the past.

Similarly, there’s really nothing like a “reply” in Twitter. Or more accurately, there’s no way to distinguish reply, reply all, forward, forward to a mailing list, or post to Facebook. Some people may assume a follow-on tweet is like a personal reply, while others may feel it’s more like a comment to a large group.

There’s no way to hide your identity on Twitter. There’s no way to post information to Twitter that doesn’t allow everybody to trace your tweets back to you, and reply to you personally. It was like this in the early days of listservs and Usenet, where you had to take relatively extreme measures to hide your e-mail address, your IP address, and even to some extent your physical location. It doesn’t have to be that way. In the days of dial-up BBS’s, before many people had e-mail, even at work, someone who wanted to say something to you had to say it in a public forum where everybody could see. With blogs and website comment threads, and with some moderated mailing lists if they were in digest form, and with some group discussion platforms, contributors are to some extent anonymous. They have to have an identity, but in most cases only the operator of the site knows how to contact them directly.

There’s no way to group discussion on Twitter, so that it “feels” like a group of people are coming together regularly to discuss the same topics. You can restrict visibility to your own feed, but Twitter isn’t a club that restricts membership so people who use it can feel safe. It isn’t a platform for setting up discussion groups, either.

There’s no way to moderate discussion on Twitter. You can’t designate one or two people to tell others when they’re getting out of line and should probably cool it. And since there’s no way to make Twitter into a “group” experience, participants themselves can’t moderate discussion as a community. There’s no way to restrict discussion among a group to the facts, or to personal communication, or to anything at all.

Different people use Twitter in different ways. Some use it for public relations. Some use it as an easy e-mail platform. Some use it as a substitute for a Usenet that’s gone away, as commenting on blogs seemed safer, and then less interesting. Some use it as a substitute for Facebook or MySpace or a personal blog. Some use it in the same way they’d use a big discussion platform like Usenet or Atrios.

In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of suffering caused by the inability to decide what Twitter should be. We’ve seen people stalked and harassed by Twitter accounts—created by someone who used it as a substitute for a web page devoted to defaming a specific person. Also, we’ve seen writers and journalists and musicians upset when they found out that readers were using Twitter as a big group where they could discuss what they read or what music they bought. Those professionals used Twitter among themselves, in part for personal reasons, in part for PR reasons, in part as an extension of their professional output. They did not intend to use Twitter to provide an outlet for fans and non-fans to discuss their work. They were upset by the way fans’ comments appeared under the Twitter platform: indistinguishable, in some cases, from personal messages to the writers themselves, and likely to come up in a search for what the writer himself or herself had written. It isn’t new for writers to become upset by the way readers talk about them in public (or mostly restricted) online discussion groups, and to call those readers out. Most likely, writers also complained about the way they imagined in-home and library-based book clubs were talking about them. But in this case, the comments were interpreted as e-mails directly to them, and taken very personally because of the apparent intimacy of the tool being used.

I’ve been using the Internet long enough to see platforms change, as more people started to use them, and to see some of the effects as people switched platforms or became more used to platforms that had just been launched. BBBS’ers and AOL’ers moving onto Usenet, around 1990 or 1991, was a painful process. The mixing and mingling between Usenet and more staid, often academic listservs—in both directions—caused a lot of friction all-round. The lack of moderation on the traditional Internet, compared with newer services like AOL and the Well, caused confusion and distress, resulting in people lashing out at those who did things the “wrong” way. The rise of chat rooms caused similar confusion, as some wanted to distinguish their groups from those more casual structures, and others just didn’t like chat and were annoyed when they were reminded of it. The rise of the personal web page, and later, the blog, created new, alternate modes of self-publication; and the rise of the blog comment section created new modes of creating and responding to a topic for discussion.

I don’t use Twitter, and as I’ve just revealed, I’m old, in Internet years. But I do know something about e-mail and related services. An app that’s used for something it wasn’t designed for may work for a little while, for a small amount of data, a small number of people, with a minimal amount of hassle. But push it to its limits and it will work less well. Maybe there’s a market for someone to create a better way to send out newsletters and the like.

[1] More accurately, from other people’s point of view, your tweets are in a big box. From your view—the sender’s point of view—each of your tweets is going to the end of a long list of all your other tweets.

January 05, 2014

John Holbo calls attention to a blog post by William Kristol, asserting that we’ve learned the lessons of the first world war well enough, and probably overlearned them by now, and now we should try moving in the opposite direction, and stop being so afraid of war.

Kristol is claiming that as late as 1914—despite Thomas Arnold, despite Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” despite Bloomsbury, despite every dissenting cultural production of the nineteenth century, especially its second half—all educated Englishmen who had learned Horace’s poem, “Dulce est decorum est” (“sweet it is, and fitting, to die for one’s country”) as young boys—all of them—lived and died believing that with all their hearts. None of them ever—not even once—even privately—ended up putting their own interests, their own life, ahead of militaristic nationalism, even a little.

Kristol is claiming that it was only the facts of an actual war—and not even that—the argument of Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poetry—that changed their minds. Then they turned against the education that had taught them Horace’s poems. But if Kristol is right—if their education led them to be that unthinking, that impervious to evidence and common sense—then Kristol has just proved that they were right to reject their education.

That’s not what he wants to argue, of course. I notice that he doesn’t himself argue that all educated Englishment “earnestly” believed everything they were taught in Latin-verse class; rather, he quotes from a version of this argument written by David Frum, currently a somewhat discredited figure in the right-wing circles to whom Kristol wants to appeal. Kristol surely wants to argue that their education was really very good, that the English upper class’s attitudes to war were really very nuanced, and that the idea of paying too much attention to the political views of a self-educated, lower-middle class poet, traumatized by battle, would be a silly one.

January 04, 2014

Over the summer, I didn’t watch as many movies as I had during the rest of the year, and then I didn’t have as much time as earlier to write about the ones I did. But at some point I lost interest in writing about them too. Maybe it was when I finally saw the new Die Hard movie and realized the trailer had been more interesting (the movie doesn’t even use Beethoven’s Ninth!). Maybe it was when I rewatched most of Amadeus and considered writing about it but wasn’t sure where to start. Maybe I realized the only movies about which I had something serious to say were stories about novelists, or nearly so. Maybe it was when I got stuck getting started writing on novels I’d read and thought I had something to say about, or writing longer posts about To Rome with Love and The Great Gatsby. Or longer posts about Breaking Bad, about themes and characters I found interesting in the show, but which contradict the apparently universal moral judgment that the main characters are, essentially, the Devil and Jesus.

Or it could have started when I read Francine Prose’s blog post about Blue Jasmine at the New York Review of Books. Prose says that movie flipped some switch in her thinking about Woody Allen, a switch that was flipped for me a few movies back. I’m not sure why seeing that she’s confirming what I’ve thought for a while makes me feel more unsure than previously about my opinion.

It could have started when I read Christian Lorentzen’s dissenting essay on Alice Munro in the London Review of Books, a few months before she won the Nobel, and the ton of bricks that came down on him, from online critics and amateur bloggers alike, for being mean and for not understanding the greatness of the stories. Since—while I can see the artistic genius of one or two of Munro’s stories, considered slowly and singularly—I don’t get much out of short stories in general and I would almost never choose to read Munro if I had other options, I was interested in Lorentzen’s own opinions here. I thought it might even serve as the basis for a reconsideration of some of the less interesting trends in contemporary literary writing. But it came to seem impossible to write about the piece without addressing the question whether Lorentzen was a mean snarky person, and without addressing the question why so many online writers—not just professionals at literary sites like The Rumpus, but ordinary people who like to follow those sites—felt the need to chime in, and all on one side.

It might have started when I wanted to write something addressing a post at a blog called The Golden Notebooks, or at another blog I discovered this year, and realized I couldn’t find a way to start.

And I thought I might write something about the most recent snark kerfuffle that started when Tom Scocca repurposed the word “smarm” to oppose that epithet. Maybe about this blog post by Jim Sleeper. But—I had to check just now to see whether I’ve written about Sleeper before, and actually published it—I did, here and here (but not here)—the vow I’ve taken not to write about David Brooks anymore encompasses Sleeper as well.

On New Year’s Eve, When Harry Met Sally was on TV. One of the characters says, “From the day after Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s, I’m crazy.” For me, the crazy period has been from the day after school starts in September. There just hasn’t seemed to be time to write things like those.

I have a few posts begun on books I read in 2013. I don’t know whether I’ll end up having time to write much in the coming months, or whether what I do write will find its way into this blog. But we’ll see.